This application has particular utility for everting catheters that are characterized with an inner catheter, outer catheter, and everting membrane that is connected to both catheters. The inner catheter may contain an inner lumen to pass fluid or media, drugs or therapeutic agents, instruments or devices such as IUD's, endoscopes, and other catheters.
For physicians and medical professionals, accessing systems for vessels and bodily cavities in patients have typically used various guidewire and catheter technologies or everting catheters. Everting catheters utilize a traversing action in which a balloon is inverted and with the influence of hydraulic pressure created by a compressible or incompressible fluid or media, rolls inside out or everts with a propulsion force through the vessel. Everting balloons have been referred to as rolling or outrolling balloons, evaginating membranes, toposcopic catheters, or linear everting catheters such as those in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,364,345; 5,372,247; 5,458,573; 5,472,419; 5,630,797; 5,902,286; 5,993,427; 6,039,721; 3,421,509; and 3,911,927; all of which are incorporated herein by reference in their entireties. These are categorized as everting balloons and are for traversing vessels, cavities, tubes, or ducts in a frictionless manner. In other words, an everting balloon can traverse a tube without imparting any shear forces on the wall being traversed. Because of this action and lack of shear forces, resultant trauma can be reduced and the risk of perforation reduced. In addition as a result of the mechanism of travel through a vessel, material and substances in the proximal portion of the tube or vessel are not pushed or advanced forward to a more distal portion of the tube or vessel.
In addition, as the everting catheter deploys inside out, uncontaminated or untouched balloon material is placed inside the vessel wall. In the inverted or undeployed state, the balloon is housed inside the catheter body and cannot come into contact with the patient or physician. As the balloon is pressurized and everted, the balloon material rolls inside out without contacting any element outside of the vessel. Another advantage of an everting balloon catheter is that the method of access is more comfortable for the patient since the hydraulic forces “pull” the balloon membrane through the vessel or duct as opposed to a standard catheter that needs to be “pushed” into and through the vessel or duct.
Everting catheters have been described as dilatation catheters. Representative examples of dilating everting catheters include U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,364,345 and 4,863,440, both of which are incorporated by reference herein in their entireties.
Everting catheters have also been described with additional elements such as a handle for controlling instruments within an everting catheter. A representative example is U.S. Pat. No. 5,346,498 which is incorporated by reference herein in its entirety. Everting balloon catheters can be constructed with an inner catheter with an internal lumen or through-lumen (or thru-lumen). The through-lumen can be used for the passage of instruments, media, materials, therapeutic agents, endoscope, guidewires, or other instruments or devices. Representative samples of everting catheters with through-lumens are in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,374,247 and 5,458,573. In addition, everting catheters have been described with waists or a narrowing of the balloon diameter, such as in U.S. Pat. No. 5,074,845, which is incorporated by reference herein in its entirety.